5 Rock Stars Who Love To Hate Their Own Songs

Though rock stars may be dedicated to their musical craft, they're also called by another siren song: fame. But the adulation of the crowd (and revenue brought in by album, ticket, and merch sales) is a powerful motivator, it's not always fun. No, it's not that fame can come with crushing levels of attention and pressure, though that's definitely a factor — it's that the hits can really come back to bite you. Imagine being a young rock star who scores a hit right away. Awesome, right? Sure, until you have to play it at concert ... after concert ... after concert. When you become more artistically mature, that super-deep tune may begin to sound embarrassingly callow. Or perhaps you scribbled something out just to please a record exec or appease the masses. Alas, that very rush job may gain the most attention, haunting you for the rest of your career.

Is this overdramatic? Maybe, but there are certainly big-name rock stars who have found themselves in situations much like the ones described above. Some will gamely play the big hit and then get on to the stuff they really like, while others seemingly have to be dragged kicking and screaming onto the stage whenever the song looms on a setlist. Quite a few are happy to elaborate on their distaste, lending insight into their complicated relationships with some of their most popular songs — though that doesn't mean people will stop asking them about it.

Okay, "Stairway to Heaven" may be a legendary rock anthem nowadays, but Robert Plant — who was was the lead singer and songwriter for Led Zeppelin for over a decade — has a complicated relationship with the song. In large part, it has to do with the fact that, over the course of his long and varied career, Plant has changed. With that artistic shift and increased maturity, perhaps, has come a clear-eyed reevaluation of the rock hit that, in Plant's hands, isn't always flattering.

"Of course, it was a good song," Plant said on the radio show Ultimate Classic Rock Nights in 2019, reserving most of his praise for the musical skill of Jimmy Page (who, along with other bandmates, seems to like Plant just fine, too). "But lyrically, now, and even vocally, I go, 'I'm not sure about that,'" he later added. What's the problem, precisely? As Plant told AXS TV, the song is pretty firmly rooted in another era, and while he still has great respect for Page's work, his lyrics "were coming out of the mind of a 23-year-old guy." "As time goes on, you may find another period of your life has got a little bit more substance," he added, explaining further, "As much as I like it, I'm not wedded to that whole deal now." Is it a flagrant distaste? Not quite, but it's also clear that Plant is ready to move on, and his lyrics needn't tag along.

Guitarist Pete Townshend hasn't been shy about sharing his opinions, especially when it comes to The Who's "Pinball Wizard." He even wrote in the liner notes of the "Tommy" remaster, the song's album, that he was ashamed of the lyrics. "I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is awful, the most clumsy piece of writing I've ever done," he wrote (via Far Out Magazine). "Oh my god, I'm embarrassed." To his confusion and, one assumes, eventual horror, everyone else in the studio thought it was perfect, and the general public did as well. In fact, it became one of the band's biggest hits, with the 1969 version of the song hitting No. 4 in the U.K. and No. 19 on the U.S.'s Billboard Hot 100. 

Too bad for Townshend, who's basically been forced to play "Pinball Wizard" for decades. As he further explained to Uncut magazine in 2004 (via Ultimate Classic Rock), he at least partially wrote the song to please a reviewer, Nik Cohn, who really, really liked to play pinball. "I just remember saying to him, with maybe an element of sarcasm, 'So, if it had pinball in it, would you give it a decent review?" Townshend recalled. "He went, 'Of course I would. Anything with pinball in it's fantastic.'" Townshend admitted that he then wrote the song "purely as a scam."

Nirvana's got many great songs in its catalog, but "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is often at the top of everyone's list, at least when it comes to popularity. Yet frontman Kurt Cobain wasn't excited about the song's success. As he told a Rolling Stone interviewer in 1994, it became downright uncomfortable to play, though leaving it off a concert setlist generated booing. "Everyone has focused on that song so much," he said, noting its near-endless play on MTV and his personal belief that he'd written much better but less popular songs. "I can barely, especially on a bad night like tonight, get through 'Teen Spirit,'" he said. "I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can't pretend to have a good time playing it."

Cobain said that the song was engineered to please audiences by (kind of) cribbing from more established bands. There are no real accusations of plagiarism going on here, but Cobain revealed that he was heavily inspired by the Pixies and "Louie, Louie." But the song's rise to become the type specimen of '90s grunge and a popular hit soured any initial fun Nirvana may have had with it. In fact, when Cobain was forced to play "Smells Like Teen Spirit," he was known to mess up on purpose, further underlining his distaste for Nirvana's most commercially successful track. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cobain's last-ever performed live song was instead "Heart-Shaped Box."

If you want to put James Hetfield in a bad mood, you might achieve your goal by making him and the rest of Metallica play "Escape." For what it's worth, the song was a rushed addition to their second album, "Ride the Lightning," tacked on when the studio asked for an extra track at the last minute. It is true that the 1984 album would have been pretty sparse without it, but nevertheless the band — including Hetfield as its lead singer and one of its songwriters — isn't exactly fond of the often-maligned "Escape." Part of the problem, besides the early-career roughness Hetfield sees in it, is that it's in the key of A, which guitarist Kirk Hammett has stated is unusual and awkward for the band.

To that end, "Escape" is rarely performed live. Metallica did play it at a 2012 music festival (above), where Hetfield uninspiringly announced its presence: "The song that we never wanted to play live ever is now on the setlist [...] And we'll do our best. You can sing along if you want, all right? That might help." Meanwhile, drummer Lars Ulrich was uncharacteristically measured in his evaluation while speaking to Metal Hammer. While not exactly calling "Escape" his darling and admitting that it's a radio-ready track (not precisely a metalhead's favorite thing), he doesn't hate it. "I don't have a particular problem with it, but it never became a live staple like the other songs on the record," he explained.

Is "Shiny Happy People" that bad? R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe sure thinks so, even if it charted pretty well for the band and arguably helped propel its 1991 album, "Out of Time," to a Grammy win. But, in 2016, frontman Stipe resignedly told BBC host Andrew Marr that it's "a fruity pop song written for children." "If there was one song that was sent into outer space to represent R.E.M. for the rest of time, I would not want it to be 'Shiny Happy People,'" he declared. Yet he also originally intended it as a bright moment of joy amidst the travails of the Gulf War and other grim world events of the era. Since then, people aren't sure if "Shiny Happy People" is sincere, satirical, or somewhere in-between. Unsurprisingly, the song has only rarely seen live performances, with Stipe telling none other than Space Ghost that he hated "Shiny Happy People" in a 1995 appearance on "Space Ghost Coast to Coast."

Stipe isn't always that harsh. "I was always at peace with it. It's just a little bit embarrassing that it became as big a hit as it did," he told The Quietus in 2011, which, well, doesn't sound totally, utterly at peace if you ask us. But, hey, the band did revive it as "Furry Happy Monsters" on a 1999 episode of "Sesame Street," so it can't be all bad.